The post-apartheid government's first priorities should have been good education and improving basic living conditions, says Max du Preez.
Twenty years into democracy, South Africa’s most valuable asset, stability, is under threat from protests, many of them violent, in townships and squatter camps. Just in the last 10 years at least 43 “service delivery” protesters were killed by the police.
It seems obvious: the post-apartheid governments’ first priorities should have been good education for the black youth and improving the basic living conditions of the poor, yet those are the two areas where successive ANC governments have failed spectacularly.
The first place where those who had been oppressed for generations wanted to feel their lives improving after liberation was where they live and raise their children. That was where their human dignity could have been restored first and most easily: decent housing, running water and proper sanitation.
Creating job opportunities, eradicating income inequality, redistributing farmland, industrialising the economy, etcetera would understandably have taken much longer.
Education and local government didn’t fail because there were not enough resources, but because of cadre deployment, terrible management, corruption, nepotism and the relationship between the ANC and trade unions.
Well, there was another reason, at least regarding local government: the rapid and massive movement of rural people to urban areas.
Many millions of them.
The proportion of South Africans living in urban areas increased from 52 percent in 1990 to an estimated 65 to 67 percent this year, resulting in more than 3 000 squatter camps in the country.
How was this not foreseen and planned for?
Wasn’t it predictable that the end of influx control (pass laws) and the dissolution of the old homelands would open the floodgates of rural people wanting to move to the cities?
Government has indeed done much, building nearly 3 million RDP houses. But it didn’t make much of a dent in the backlog as people came streaming in.
President Jacob Zuma and other ANC leaders have blamed “government success” for the increase in service delivery protests – as they get more they want more.
Public Protector Thuli Madonsela’s reaction at the time was that this was being “disrespectful of people”, pointing out that lack of services are more often the result of corruption and mismanagement.
Some of the most violent recent local protests revolved around people’s illegal occupation of private or state land.
The government has spent many billions in agricultural land reform, but in every metro in the country there is a shortage of land for urban people to settle on.
Shouldn’t urban land be a much more urgent priority?
I’ve referred to the example of India’s Middle Vaitarna Dam before in this column.
To recap: Mumbai’s development was hampered by a water shortage, which prompted the Indian government to build a massive and very expensive new dam.
After its completion, it was calculated that if all the leaking pipes and taps in Mumbai were fixed, the city would have had more water available to it than the new dam provided.
The moral of the story is that South Africa needs to make ordinary things work properly before we embark on grandiose new schemes costing billions of dollars.
Human dignity is one of the founding principles of the constitution.
Every time we hear of the president having a security upgrade at his private home for millions of rand or chartering planes; every time we read about colossal salaries paid to executives at the SABC or Eskom; every time we see politicians splashing money on themselves or on vanity projects, we think: that money could have built x number of houses, toilets or township streets.
The fact that there are a few local authorities that are successfully run is proof that it can be done and that people rather than resources are the biggest problem.
I live in an area run by a DA local government and I’m very happy with the way I’m treated.
But I’m a white middle-class person.
I really don’t see the same care being applied to my area’s townships, and they need it more than I do.
It is probably true that the conditions in townships in DA-ruled municipalities are more under the magnifying glass than those in ANC-ruled areas.
It is probably unfair, but it is the inevitable reality.
The DA will simply have to live it down.
It’s not doing that very well right now, especially in Cape Town, and so it is undermining its goal of ridding itself of the stigma of a party that cares more about whites.
The ANC could get badly wounded in the 2016 local elections. It has a secret weapon, though: Pravin Gordhan, the new Minister of Co-operative Governance and Traditional Affairs.
Gordhan’s stated drive to clean up local administrations and professionalise local government should get the enthusiastic support of the whole cabinet and indeed Luthuli House.
* Max du Preez is an author and columnist.
** The views expressed here are not necessarily those of Independent Newspapers.